Neither fish nor fowl, but mock meat dishes are fascinating creations at this restaurant, which carnivores will enjoy, too

Neua nam tok or beef lemongrass salad is served with Thai spices.

Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf
, Montreal Gazette

This is the first in a series on vegetarian dining in Montreal. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to cover for some time for professional and personal reasons. First, I get a lot of emails from readers asking about meat-free options; they point out that sometimes they’re not as easy to find on menus as they could be: For instance, it turns out on further inquiry that a soup labelled as vegetarian is actually made with chicken broth. I also hear from an increasing number of people with dietary restrictions, particularly sensitivities to gluten, along with other emerging allergies. And there are growing ethical concerns about the industrialized food system, where ingredients are coming from and what processed products are doing to our health.

Cliché as it sounds, some of my best friends really are vegetarians. And for years, I’ve witnessed their requests met with sighs (and been guilty of sighing myself). They rarely get to come out for reviews. Dining out with the pescetarians is relatively easy, but with those who don’t eat fish, it’s often a challenge, especially when even advance phone calls to higher-end establishments result in a plate of pasta made with no love. Really? Is it that hard? In the past decade — the decade of pork belly — vegetarian bashing was de rigueur among celebrity chefs and wannabe foodies, and feasting with a vegetarian was portrayed as about as much fun as a night at the bar with a member of the temperance movement.

At the same time, there has been a lot of movement on the scene, with socially engaged businesses flourishing, vegetarian tasting menus appearing in unexpected places and health-conscious alternatives easier to find. Attitudes are changing for a lot of us, I think. Certainly, I eat less meat at home, and we get most of it through alternative sources, be it an acquaintance’s father who raises sheep in the Eastern Townships, friends in Mile End who make their own sausages, or going in with a group on a whole pig from a heritage pork breeder in Ontario. It’s harder to get that same level of traceability at restaurants, particularly budget restaurants, and it’s increasingly an issue I find myself coming up against.

Of course, you don’t have to be vegetarian to enjoy a vegetarian meal, so with a flexitarian future in mind, over the next few weeks, we’ll see what the city’s meat-free restaurants have to offer.

For some time after ChuChai opened in 1997, it was the designated “meaningful meal” spot among my vegetarian friends. Birthday? ChuChai. Breakup blues? ChuChai. Out-of-town parents visiting? ChuChai. The vibrant Thai flavours and uncanny mock meats made it one place they could drag the carnivores in their lives without getting grief. So when considering a series on vegetarian restaurants, this seemed the obvious place to start.

My most recent visit had been for a Christmas party a couple of years back, when the restaurant seemed a touch frayed. Still, seeing it temporarily closed in the winter of 2012 was a bit of a shocker, especially as weeks wore into months. After riding out an annus horribilis, which involved not just renovations but financial restructuring, partners Lily Sirikittikul and Patrick Michaud reopened in June in the roles of executive chef and general director.

The setting has been spiffed up. There’s a new sign, redecorated terrasse (with artwork by local collective En Masse), enlarged bar area and subdued decor in shades of grey – not 50, but maybe five. The room is mercifully quiet compared with a lot of local eateries (a geriatric-sounding sentiment echoed, for the record, by the 70-year-old and the 31-year-old at my table). Rather than the front seating area, where the glare from a patio light reflected off the tables, we were drawn to the soft banquette and animal portraits at the back. Looking closely, we noticed the chicken, cow and fish in the paintings were smiling.

That’s because the panang beef, fish cakes, ginger chicken, and salt and pepper calamari here are fashioned from soy protein and wheat gluten (the kitchen is vegan friendly, less so gluten-free). Fish, for example, is made of soy skin and rolled in seaweed to re-create its skin. For duck, seitan gets a marathon marinade before being baked to crispiness on top. To say it’s all about imitation meat doesn’t quite do the creativity of cuisine justice: Sirikittikul’s skills run deep — her mother was a cook for the royal family in Laos, and her brother operates Chao Praya, where she originally worked.

The reformulated menu features Thaipas — a Thai take on tapas, if that wasn’t obvious. Under that heading were dumplings, spring rolls, and the much-loved miam kram (it won a Quebec finger food award in 2005). Promising five flavours in one roll-your-own bouchée, it’s the ideal gateway dish. Glossy betel leaves were topped with shredded, roasted coconut, cashew, slivered pepper, lime, ginger and honey-sweet sauce, the various tastes coming to the fore in turns.

New among appetizers, the spicy beef salad was also a thrill. A play on the almost-raw neua nam tok, it was moist, tender and zapped with chilies, citrus and scallion that would normally continue to “cook” the meat, balanced with cool lettuce, mint and granules of peanut. There are also salads of green papaya, mango, and even larb ped (duck salad) as well as those hot and sour tom kha and tom yum soups.

How could they possibly, you might wonder, reproduce shrimp? Blushed with pink on the outer curve, these had jiggle and bounce, a texture achieved in part from the Japanese starch konnyaku, also likely responsible for the faintly slimy feel. Tossed with soft and chewy Chinese eggplant, peppers and lime leaves, this was a bright rendition of a classic dish — the novelty factor of shrimp-that’s-not-shrimp adding interest.

Red curry sauce, thickened with coconut milk and coloured with spice paste, coated the ingredients in our next choice: just-wilted leaves of Thai basil, green and red peppers, and pieces of duck that, unfortunately, weren’t particularly ducky. While the sauce was on the sweet side, it worked with the warm sugars and acidity from chunks of pineapple.

For a dish not masquerading as something it wasn’t, we got fried tofu in a silky peanut sauce with crispy spinach. Clean and neat, particularly those air-light, deep green wafers of sweetened spinach.

ChuChai’s faux-ness is fascinating, and it takes a while to get over the “I can’t believe it’s not meat” phase. The food is best appreciated not just for how close it comes to the real thing, but as its own unique thing that is neither one nor the other. It was interesting to hear how the idea for its distinctive cuisine emerged. When I spoke to Michaud by phone afterward, he explained he and then-spouse Sirikittikul went vegetarian after the birth of their son (now 18, he waits tables in the restaurant). “When we stopped eating meat, we realized there were not too many options in Montreal that weren’t all peace, love and granola,” he said. Sirikittikul began developing dishes, they held a dinner party of chefs and other restaurant industry friends, and didn’t tell them they weren’t eating meat. “When they were fooled, we knew we were on to something,” he recalled. Remarkably, he estimated 95 per cent of his customers are not vegetarian, and calls himself flexitarian — sometimes you eat meat, sometimes you don’t. “We’re not telling people you have to be vegetarian, but we are saying eat less meat; it’s better for you, and it’s better for the planet,” he said.

He has big plans for the brand: launching the space next door as internationally inspired Bistro C in the coming weeks, finding a new home for little sister restaurant Chuch, hosting cooking classes, and upgrading ChuChai’s image. With a promised rehaul of the short wine list and final touches to the setting, it may inch further into fine-dining territory – right now, it’s one of those places that can go either way. I thought the tab of $100 for three people, with a glass of wine or Singha each, was relatively reasonable for what we got.

Whether you’re more one per cent or more 99 per cent, it’s unusual enough to be a special night out. And whether you’re one-per-cent vegetarian or 99-per-cent vegetarian, the same holds true.

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